Eighty-eight years separated the composition of the two works given premieres by Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra last night, and it was not Arvo Part's piece, first performed in 2000, that provided the revelation, but Reinhold Glière's Third Symphony, heard complete in London for the first time.
The Ukrainian-born Glière is a shadowy, transitional figure in Russian music, best known now for a handful of rather eccentric pieces, such as his concertos for harp and for coloratura soprano. Born in 1875, he composed his first works when Rimsky Korsakov was still alive, became a highly regarded teacher at the Moscow Conservatoire (where his pupils included Prokofiev) and continued to be a force in his country's music right through the revolution and well into the Soviet era, when he curried favour with folk- inflected pieces right up to his death in 1956.
If those works now seem thinly cosmetic, there is nothing ersatz about the Third Symphony, first performed in 1912. In a wonderfully prepared and dramatically thrilling performance under Brabbins it emerged as a vastly ambitious piece of musical architecture, firmly rooted in the 19th-century Russian tradition. Its four movements play for some 80 minutes, all anchored on an explicit programme revealed by its subtitle, Ilya Muryomets, a Ukrainian folk hero whose exploits are depicted vividly in the symphonic scheme.
The music reveals a mixed pedigree. The basic style derives from Tchaikovsky, whose programme symphony Manfred constantly hovers behind the work's rhetoric. But the influence of Wagner haunts the score too, as it does so much Russian music of the period. The first movement, depicting its hero's early life (apparently spent sitting on a stove for 30 years) takes over the chromatic churning and yearning of Parsifal, and ends up sounding like Scriabin in its refusal to reach a resolution. Elsewhere there are echoes of French impressionism (especially in the third movement and the spectral outer sections of the slow second). The brassy conflict-ridden finale eventually comes full circle with the return of the climactic theme from the first movement. It is a sprawling yet totally fascinating work.
Part's 10-minute piece for string orchestra, Orient and Occident, made a withdrawn preface to the unbuttoned exuberance of Glière's great canvas. Intended to represent the west and eastern components of Russian culture and faith, it is a piece that proceeds in a series of declamatory phrases, most of them delivered in rhythmic unison, and carrying the inflections of the Russian Orthodox liturgy - the Credo of the Mass was apparently its starting point. Compared with the tintinnabulations of Part's music of the 1980s and 90s it is austere and monochrome, but, like them, it is still an unabashed declaration of religious faith.
